Members of
Congress from a bi-partisan human rights panel on Thursday challenged the Obama
administration to get serious about putting pressure on the governments of Egypt
and Iraq to halt violent attacks on Christian minorities.

“Human rights
has been significantly demoted in the past two years, and it’s appalling,” said
Rep. Christopher Smith (R-NJ). “This administration gets an F for its response
to human rights abuses.”

For Rep. Anna
Eshoo (D-CA), the grand-daughter of Assyrian and Armenian Christians who fled
the genocide carried out by the Ottoman Turks and their Kurdish allies at the
end of WWI, the dramatic upsurge in attacks against Christians in Iraq and Egypt
was reminiscent of stories she had learned from childhood.

“Going to the
market and riding the bus, Iraqi Christians face death every day,” she said.
“There is no question that Christians are being targeted” in Iraq.

Rep. Eshoo
called on the Obama administration to “move this up in the set of priorities of
the State Department” by elaborating a “comprehensive strategy” for dealing with
the persecution of Christians in Iraq.

“A crisis calls
for more than good intentions,” she said.

Although tens of
billions of U.S. taxpayer funds have gone to reconstruction programs in Iraq, a
scant $20 million has been allocated to projects in the predominantly Christian
Nineveh Plain in northern Iraq, the ancestral homeland of many Iraqi Christians
and a relative safe haven to which thousands of families have fled in recent
years.

Worse, the way
U.S. AID has spent that money is “not transparent,” Rep. Eshoo said.

So she and other
members of the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate recently asked the
Government Accountability Office (GAO) to conduct a far-reaching audit of U.S.
reconstruction assistance to Iraq, in particular as it touches on projects for
Christian areas.

Julia Taimoorazy,
president of the Iraqi Christian Relief Council of Chicago, Ill, told members in
private meetings on Thursday that most of the $20 million has been
misappropriated or diverted by the entities controlled by the neighboring
Kurdish Regional Authority (KRG), including a private company allegedly
controlled by the former prime minister of the Kurdish Region, Nichevan Barzani.

“We have only
seen $180,000 of that money reach the Nineveh Plain for a well,” she said.

Sister Maria
Hanna, a Dominican nun who runs the al Hayatt maternity hospital in Baghdad, was
promised a $1.2 million grant by the State Department to build a similar
facility in Karakhosh, the biggest town in the Nineveh Plain.

Instead, the
money was paid out by the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Mosul to a different
entity not operating in the Nineveh Plain, which currently has no hospital at
all for a population estimated at around 100,000.

The lack of
schools, jobs, industry and infrastructure, coupled to an exploding population
of refugees who have fled the violence in Baghdad and Mosul, has led local
leaders to despair.

“Many families leave after they have
stayed here for awhile and see there are no jobs and they give up hope,” Bassam
Ballo, mayor of Tel Kaif, the largest city in the Nineveh Plain, told me during
a trip to the region two years ago.

Gwendolen Cates, a documentary
film-maker from New York who just returned from northern Iraq, was stunned and
saddened by what she saw.

“There is a level of despair I have
not seen on any of my previous trips,” she told me. Some 1800 Christian
students at Mosul University are staying home from classes because they have
received death threats – in some cases, letters handed to them by Muslim
security guards working at the university itself, she said.

Rep. Eshoo said that a comprehensive
strategy must address how to distribute assistance and development aid, how to
protect communities at risk, how to help the Iraqi government in prosecuting the
perpetrators of crimes against Christians, and streamlined asylum procedures for
Iraqi Christians who are in imminent danger.

Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va), who chaired
Thursday’s hearing of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission on Capitol Hill,
slammed the Obama White House for its tepid response to the violence.

After the October 31 attack on Our
Lady of Salvation Catholic Church in Baghdad by Muslim jihadists that killed 58
Christians attending mass, the White House “failed to even mention the word
‘Christian’ or ‘church,’ suggesting that this attack was simply part of a
broader pattern of generalized violence in Iraq and not a targeted attack
against an indigenous faith community,” Rep. Wolf said.

Wolf said he was exploring
legislation that would require the State Department to designate special
representatives in the embassies in Baghdad and Cairo whose sole job will be to
monitor human rights and religious persecution.

In tandem with that move, Wolf said
he wants President Obama to appoint a “special envoy” to persecuted minorities
in the Middle East, who will report back to the president, the Secretary of
State, and Congress.

Wolf said he was motivated by the
example of Senator John Danforth, who was president Bush’s special envoy to the
Sudan and whose personal prestige was instrumental in brokering the peace deal
that led to last week’s referendum on independence for Southern Sudan.

The Obama administration seems poised
to oppose such a move, or to acquiesce in a way that prevents any meaningful
action.

Deputy Assistant of State Tamara
Coffman Wittes was noncommittal when asked whether the State Department would
favor such an appointment, noting that Republicans in the Senate had blocked the
confirmation of the administration’s nominee to become Ambassador-at-Large for
Religious Freedom, a position created by Congress in legislation sponsored by
Rep. Wolf that was strongly opposed by the Clinton administration.

The fact that it took the Obama
administration two years to fill the Ambassador-at-Large position showed “a lack
of passion” at the State Department to pursue religious persecution, Wolf said.

Nina Shea, a member of the U.S.
Commission for International Religious Freedom, also criticized the Obama
administration for treating the latest bombings of Christian churches in Iraq
and Egypt as isolated events.

“The goal of the extremists is to
drive Christians from Iraq,” she said. “It is religious cleansing.”

Shea warned that the Commission this
spring would debate whether to designate Egypt a Country of Particular Concern
because of its failure to crack down on the persecution of Christians and other
religious minorities.

Designation by the Commission could
lead to U.S. economic sanctions, a diplomatic chill, and possibly even a cut-off
in U.S. foreign aid to Egypt, which continues to receive more than $2 billion
every year from the U.S. taxpayer.

Shea said that Egypt “needs to
address incitement to violence by halting government subsidies to clerics and
media who incite to violence.”

There have been documented cases
recently of government clerics in Egypt issuing death threats to Coptic
Christians, she said.

Rep. Trent Franks issued a stern
warning to the government of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

“It is increasingly difficult for us
as Americans to maintain support for a government that is attacking the voices
that would help sustain its own democracy, while defending the Islamic
extremists who inflame religious intolerance,” Franks said.

“If no significant change takes
place, I will call for the United States to reduce aid to Egypt.”

Dina Guirguis, a research fellow at
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said that Coptic Christians were
being prosecuted by the Egyptian authorities “for praying inside their own homes
without a permit.”

Muslims converts to Christianity are
routinely discriminated against by the authorities, who stamp into their
identity papers that they are “former Muslims,” a designation that is an open
invitation to discrimination, she said.

Coptic Christians account for roughly
10 percent of Egypt’s 80 million population, while in Iraq the Christian
community has been decimated by the massive exodus and today accounts for less
than two percent of Iraq’s 28 million people.

Representatives of the
Chaldo-Assyrian-Syriac communities in the United States were asking Congress to
support last month’s declaration by a coalition of 16 Christian groups inside
Iraq for the creation of a “19th province” in Iraq in the Nineveh
Plain.

“We don’t want this to be only for
the Christians,” said David William Lazar, chairman of the American Mesopotamian
Organization of California. “We want it to be the only true multi-cultural,
pluralist province in all of Iraq.”

Until recently, Christians inside
Iraq have been divided over whether to press their claim under Article 125 of
the Iraqi constitution for a separate province. But the dramatic surge in Muslim
violence against Christians has convinced many community leaders that
self-government is the only way to guarantee enough security to prevent the
remnant of the community still in Iraq from fleeing into exile.

“We have recruited 3,000 people to
receive police training, but the Iraqi government refuses to fund it,” said Alan
Mansour, the U.S. representative of the Assyrian Democratic Movement.

The ADM is the largest Christian
party in Iraq and currently has three members in the Iraqi parliament.

Some 700 Christian policemen trained
using funds appropriated with help from Senator Mark Kirk were “demoted to
become local guards” by the Kurdish authorities, he added.

Rep. Allen West (R-Fla), the
firebrand of the freshman class of Tea Party representatives, said he was eager
to join the battle.

“We have a responsibility to the
Christians of Iraq. We need to stand up as a leader of the Judeo-Christian world
and create options for Iraqi Christians so they can come to the United States or
remain anchored to the ancestral homeland.”

West did two tours of duty as a U.S.
Army officer in Iraq and served later in Afghanistan as a civilian advisor. He
wowed audiences in Florida during the election campaign with his frank
assessment of the threat from jihadi Islam.

“What’s going on in Iraq today is
religious genocide,” he said. “When tolerance becomes a one-way street, it leads
to cultural suicide.”